You remember that fancy of Plato's, of a man who had grown to maturity in
some dark distance, and was brought on a sudden into the upper air to see
the sun rise. What would his wonder be, his rapt astonishment at the sight
we daily witness with indifference! With the free open sense of a child,
yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole heart would be kindled by
that sight, he would discern it well to be Godlike, his soul would fall
down in worship before it. Now, just such a childlike greatness was in the
primitive nations. The first Pagan Thinker among rude men, the first man
that began to think, was precisely this child-man of Plato's. Simple, open
as a child, yet with the depth and strength of a man. Nature had as yet no
name to him; he had not yet united under a name the infinite variety of
sights, sounds, shapes and motions, which we now collectively name
Universe, Nature, or the like,--and so with a name dismiss it from us. To
the wild deep-hearted man all was yet new, not veiled under names or
formulas; it stood naked, flashing in on him there, beautiful, awful,
unspeakable. Nature was to this man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it
forever is, preternatural. This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees,
the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;--that great deep sea of azure
that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud
fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain; what
_is_ it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at
all. It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty; it
is by our superior levity, our inattention, our _want_ of insight. It is
by _not_ thinking that we cease to wonder at it. Hardened round us,
encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions,
hearsays, mere _words_. We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud
"electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out
of glass and silk: but _what_ is it? What made it? Whence comes it?